> for applications that can easily fit within standard containers and standard allocation paradigms, C++ actually works really well already. Use your smart pointers. Use your containers. Follow the rules everyone tells you about not using bare new/malloc. And... it's basically just as safe
This is "don't write bugs, lol, and you're safe" argument. It has been demonstrated many, many times on HN, that you can cause UB in C++ using just high-level standard containers and smart pointers, without doing anything suspicious with raw pointers. Bugs of that kind are virtually impossible to detect during a typical code-review. So it is not "just as safe". It is tad safer than C, but nowhere near Rust.
> But the space between "Need to stay away from C++" and "Should probably just have written it in Go" seems to be getting smaller and not larger.
That might sound as a rant, but IMHO the designers of Go sadly made some odd choices in areas unrelated to memory management, which put me off from Go. Go is not just Rust with borrow checker replaced by tracing GC. It is a completely different language, with a much different "feel":
* some syntax choices that seem to have no justification other than "we wanted to make it look different than other languages" (ok, one can get used to it)
* no sum types / unions / enums
* code generation / copy pasting instead of proper macros
* error handling not really better than in C (caused by no sum types)
* visibility controlled by character case (so when you want to unprivate sth, you have to find-replace all occurrences; I guess this stupid idea originates from Python)
* unused stuff is hard error (terrible for prototyping)
* you don't need generics, but we've just added them anyways ;d
* no tools for controlling mutability/immutability/sharing (which is still useful in GCed languages)
* data races possible, accidental mutable sharing possible
* no RAII for deterministic destruction of non-memory resources (`defer` doesn't even come close)
* package/dependency management IMHO subpar compared to cargo
When trying to learn Go, I had exactly same feeling as when I first learned Java (after C++) - that the authors of the language designed it for people less capable than the creators themselves. So I didn't like it.
This is "don't write bugs, lol, and you're safe" argument. It has been demonstrated many, many times on HN, that you can cause UB in C++ using just high-level standard containers and smart pointers, without doing anything suspicious with raw pointers. Bugs of that kind are virtually impossible to detect during a typical code-review. So it is not "just as safe". It is tad safer than C, but nowhere near Rust.
> But the space between "Need to stay away from C++" and "Should probably just have written it in Go" seems to be getting smaller and not larger.
That might sound as a rant, but IMHO the designers of Go sadly made some odd choices in areas unrelated to memory management, which put me off from Go. Go is not just Rust with borrow checker replaced by tracing GC. It is a completely different language, with a much different "feel":
* some syntax choices that seem to have no justification other than "we wanted to make it look different than other languages" (ok, one can get used to it)
* no sum types / unions / enums
* code generation / copy pasting instead of proper macros
* error handling not really better than in C (caused by no sum types)
* visibility controlled by character case (so when you want to unprivate sth, you have to find-replace all occurrences; I guess this stupid idea originates from Python)
* unused stuff is hard error (terrible for prototyping)
* you don't need generics, but we've just added them anyways ;d
* no tools for controlling mutability/immutability/sharing (which is still useful in GCed languages)
* data races possible, accidental mutable sharing possible
* no RAII for deterministic destruction of non-memory resources (`defer` doesn't even come close)
* package/dependency management IMHO subpar compared to cargo
When trying to learn Go, I had exactly same feeling as when I first learned Java (after C++) - that the authors of the language designed it for people less capable than the creators themselves. So I didn't like it.